Coup d'État by Edward Luttwak

Author:Edward Luttwak [Coup d'Etat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2016-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

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6 See next section, p. 97.

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Our brief survey has shown that only a small part of the police force is likely to be able to intervene against us, and of this a yet smaller part is likely to do so with any enthusiasm. The natural inclination of the police will be to "ride" the crisis out and, as individuals, to avoid endangering their positions vis-à-vis their possible future employers. The coup may well be planned as a military operation, but it will not—unless partially or totally unsuccessful—involve any actual fighting. Thus, the fact that the police are not heavily armed does not fundamentally explain their low intervention capability, as compared to the army. The real difference between the two is in their degree of integration in the civil society. While the army can develop a corporate ideology and mentality which is divergent—or even opposed—to the civilian one, the police are usually too intimately involved in civilian life to do so.

This can be either an advantage or an obstacle from our point of view. On the one hand the eccentricity of the army will mean that a regime can retain its appeal in the closed world of the military barracks after losing it in society at large. This might interfere with our recruiting, but it could work the other way, i.e. we may find that the army is fundamentally opposed to a government which much civilian opinion accepts. Recruiting our forces among the police will almost always be more difficult than in the army. Firstly, the lower level of (automatic) discipline will mean that recruiting an officer may not bring over "his" men as well. Further, the fact that policemen live among the public will mean that the internal dynamics which can be generated in the closed world of a military unit would be dissipated in this more open environment and the "snowball" effect which would bring entire units over to us after a limited degree of infiltration will not operate. All these factors point the same way: the low degree of intervention capability—for, as well as against, us—and the difficulty of incorporation both indicate that while the army should be penetrated the police forces can be dealt with—defensively—after the coup.

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